A typical enterprise can include a variety of computing devices including laptops, desktops, mobile devices, and servers. These computing devices can communicate with each other via different communication protocols depending on the operating system and application requirements. Systems management, which may include security management, is critical to the health of the enterprise.
A key aspect of systems management is compliance checking, which can involve ensuring that computing devices adhere to a compliance level as defined by the enterprise. For example, compliance checking may include determining whether a computing device has a defined set of operating system and/or application software patches, has a correct version of an antivirus software installed, has updated virus signatures installed, and/or has properly configured applications (e.g., a firewall). Furthermore, administrators can also track non-compliant machines and can restrict their privileges in some manner (e.g., no network connectivity) until the machines become compliant. Such restrictions are imposed due to the threat that non-compliant computing devices may pose to other computing resources on the network. Alternatively, or additionally, administrators prefer to have non-compliant machines be made compliant automatically, referred to as remediation.